Automated brain parcellation rendering and visualization in R with coldcuts

Abstract

Parcellations are fundamental tools in neuroanatomy, allowing researchers to place functional imaging and molecular data within a structural context in the brain. Visualizing these parcellations is critical to guide biological understanding of clinical and experimental datasets in humans and model organisms. However, software used to visualize parcellations is different from the one used to analyze these datasets, greatly limiting the visualization of experimental data within parcellations. We present coldcuts, an open source R package that allows to automatically generate, store and visualize any volume-based parcellation easily and with minimal manual curation. coldcuts allows to integrate external datasets and offers rich 2D and 3D visualizations. coldcuts is freely available at http://github.com/langleylab/coldcuts and several curated coldcuts objects are made available for human, mouse, chimpanzee and Drosophila parcellations at https://github.com/langleylab/coldcuts_segmentations.